


Variations on the Death of a Soldier

by farevenasdecidedtouse



Category: Fallout 3
Genre: Angst, Gen, Misses Clause Challenge, Multiple AU Options, Post-Canon, angst with a side of hope
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-28
Updated: 2017-12-06
Packaged: 2019-02-08 02:55:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,476
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12855210
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/farevenasdecidedtouse/pseuds/farevenasdecidedtouse
Summary: Cross dies. Lyons dies. These events may or may not coincide.





	1. 2278

**Author's Note:**

  * For [furiosity](https://archiveofourown.org/users/furiosity/gifts).



> Thanks to my wonderful spouse for beta-reading this.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> And everemoore he hadde a sovereyn prys;  
> And though that he were worthy, he was wys,  
> And of his port as meeke as is a mayde.  
> He nevere yet no vileynye ne sayde  
> In al his lyf unto no maner wight.  
> He was a verray, parfit gentil knyght.
> 
> \- Geoffery Chaucer, _Canterbury Tales_

Cross had always stood out of the seas of milling adults Sarah remembered from her childhood. Even in full armor, even gathered with the other paladins outside the enemy-filled shell of the Citadel in her earliest memories, she knew Cross by the shrapnel scars across her helmet, the particular warping of her Brotherhood insignia under regularly touched-up layers of paint. The way she stood, the words she used and the deliberate way she spoke them even surrounded by live fire.

Sarah knew that this was the time to both mourn and celebrate. Cross had died in battle, not by cancer or accident or a surprising old age, and Sarah was not sentimental. (Everyone told her so.) Yet sadness had refused to come for the first three days until she broke down sobbing in the mess hall through the blank space that had filled her mind since the news. She ran before anyone could attempt to shout at her, or worse, console her. Sitting on the edge of her cot as tears trailed down her face, she allowed them to flow until they stopped more from dehydration and exhaustion than an end to her grief. Then, she had straightened, changed her tear-spattered shirt, washed her face in the nearest sink, and strode back to the canteen and her now-cold meal. When Sarah had apologised to her master-at-arms for her tardiness over dinner no one had said anything, and she was content.

Now, as she donned the T-45d suit that felt like a second skin by now, the details resounded leadenly through her head. According to the field medic the angle of the burn suggested that Cross had been dead before she hit the ground, some weakness or warping of the neck jointing redirecting the plasma bolt directly along the underside of her jaw and through her brainstem. The area of the suit had been too damaged to tell, but Sarah had nonetheless ordered the rest of the Pride to submit their armor to the quartermaster for diagnosis and repair. All had gladly agreed, too shaken by the thought of a simple equipment malfunction, or worse, human error—error from Star Paladin Cross, who never seemed to have made an error in her career—taking them from the Brotherhood ranks as well. The skirmish in question had been no different than any other they had fought since taking back the Purifier—easier, even, considering the destruction of Raven Rock and the dwindling numbers of Enclave. They had lost other good soldiers in earlier engagements. All of them had been mourned. None of them had been Cross.

Remembrance of the loss came over her subsequently at odd times, and less so - her father walking the perimeter with his new bodyguard, a particular smell of wood smoke and Cram she associated with the field, the color of the sky over the Potomac just before dark. And, of course, Catherine wandering the Citadel like a restless spirit, counting the days until she could pay her respects and move on from the organization that had accepted her but that she refused to become a part of. _She knew the risks going back out into the field,_ Catherine had said.

Sarah had bitten back her snarl with military aplomb. Of course the sheltered Vault girl felt guilty, and of course she was trying to justify her involvement to herself even though it wasn't her fault. Sarah didn't blame her for taking Cross away, for Cross risking her life for the cause in the field once again after so many years of devotion to her father and her father alone. (No one even had to tell her that she didn't.)

The formal grave monument had been constructed as of the previous week, a few visitors to that section of the courtyard casting dark, muttered aspersions on the lack of tradition only to be quelled by her, herself of all people. Yes, it was untraditional—what about the Lyon’s Pride wasn’t? Yes, Star Paladin Cross had left an official will they could pull up from the Scrolls. Yes, Elder Lyons was in favor of this. It may well have been the Vault girl’s idea, or Cross’s down from some half-remembered scrap of ancient lore hidden in the Arlington library archives, but what mattered was that her wishes be carried forward. No, Sarah would not reconsider, nor would her father. If this was what a warrior's funeral was—had once been—then they would grant it, for the truest warrior of the Brotherhood.

Despite Cross's devotion to the Codex, (she was the only person Sarah knew who quoted it both often and without a facetious edge) she had always valued nods to older ways. Her practised, old-world diction and the vocabulary with which she spoke were like a holotape recording of one of those ancient knight’s tales that she had discussed incessantly with Catherine. It set her apart from the rest of the East Coast Brotherhood. Everything she said had its own gravity, even when snapping orders in combat or chatting casually with the rest of a patrol. Even when Sarah had sat with Cross and her father late at night on the days she could shrug off the mantle of Squire and Brotherhood of Steel Soldier and The Elder's Daughter and be Sarah Lyons, a girl like any other in the Capitol Waste, talking earnestly about radio broadcasts and new hydroponics developments and how the world was before the bombs fell. Despite these occasional interludes, she had never imagined Cross to be a mother, or like one—Sarah had no recollection of her own mother but she imagined that having one would have felt different. A mother, even a soldier mother, would have been ordinary in a different way. Cross, even when she was ordinary—laughing with fellow paladins over jokes that Sarah’s father pretended not to hear, doggedly trying to get the last few morsels out of the bottom of a can of Pork n' Beans, snapping instantly out of a deep sleep and rushing in only a tank top out into the bitter cold of the parade grounds to respond to a perimeter alarm—would never have provided the same kind of love and support that Sarah imagined as maternal. She had always seemed too in love with the ideals of the Brotherhood to dedicate herself to one person in the way of a parent. Thus, the love she had for individuals had been a different love, at once deeper and more removed.

And yet, it had always seemed enough.

Power armor in place, flamer strapped to her back, Sarah was the second-to-last to join the guard formation that stood in front of the A Ring doorway, proceeded by a solemn-faced squire equipped with a drum. To its beat, the remnants of Lyon’s Pride—herself, Tristan, Gallows, Kodiak—raised the bier and its shroud-covered burden (the face under it drawn and distorted, ashen-brown skin warped around the wound just under her jawbone.) As one, they stepped past the Brotherhood populace that lined the steps to the Citadel’s downward slope toward the bay, toward the ocean. Near the end stood Catherine, her eyes red but her face composed, flanked by the Super Mutant who had saved them both at the Purifier battle. The scrappy dog she insisted on dragging with her through the Citadel sat beside her, head cocked at a curious angle but too well-trained or understanding of the situation to move from her master’s side. Over the steady wind Sarah couldn’t hear the quiet hum of the Purifier at the distance, but she could swear she felt it resonating subtly through the air.

Head high, jaw locked in place, Sarah stepped down the ramp from the Citadel as rows of paladins and scribes alike clapped gauntleted fists to armored chests at their passage. As one, their heads bowed with the dip of the bier onto the crudely constructed boat. The tinder for the fire had been piled beside the dock that morning by a few squires, wide-eyed with their work’s importance, and the four of them made short work of the pile. Once finished they stepped back to the plodding drumbeat, all save Sarah. The flamer tank had sagged to one side as they marched, and only now did Sarah shrug the worn straps back up her shoulders before raising the nozzle toward the boat.

The jet of fire illuminated the shadows around the riverbank, casting light into the darkest depths of the Potomac. In the wavering halo of heat, the edge of the pier beneath her began to smoulder but Sarah dutifully waited three, four, five beats of flame to step back, pushing the boat off into the current with a metal-encased foot. Already stripes of flame had begun to flow over the oil the shroud had been doused with, to burn until nothing remained, flesh consumed by fire, fire consumed by water. By what she, and Catherine, and Sarah herself, had made. What they had all made.

The Waters of Life, Catherine had called them, as her mother had before her, a philosophy of the old days kept alive by a select few. As the raft that bore one of those that had returned them to life was born out into the gently undulating waves by the tide, Sarah caught sight of one of the more and more frequent Capitol trade caravans paused on the opposite side of the river. As the weathered mercenaries and merchants paused in their journey to witness the ceremony, the Capitol Waste had never seemed more alive in the face of death.


	2. 2280

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> And all this Vegetable World appear’d on my left Foot,  
> As a bright sandal from’d immortal of precious stones & gold:  
> I stooped down & bound it on to walk forward thro’ Eternity.
> 
> \- William Blake, "Milton"

 One by one their comrades in arms strode from the Citadel cemetery until Cross was left alone. Under a sky of gold and lead she contemplated the gravestone before her.

She was aware of her own life in a vivid, hectic fuge, breath loud in her ears, chest and throat pulsing with her heartbeat, the lifeless steel of her limbs feeling a living extension of herself. To live, to continue to exist in a body like hers, made her shut her eyes and lean against the stone to feel granite chipped down from some ruined building into monument form beneath her bare palm. She allowed herself to wish it had been her, throwing herself between Sarah and some Wasteland-dwelling Death with a char-black radsuit and mechanical scythe. _I have done all I can. She is young and full of life and potential. Take me._

Lying on the A Ring infirmary table Sarah had been both beautiful and an empty tangle of meat and bone. The grenade had torn through her power armor with ease, stream after stream of bullets then raking blood and tissue and bone from her side as she slumped to the mud below them. _Some kind of mercenaries,_ the living had said, _but equipped like the Enclave. Who's supplying them?_ Murmurs and accusations had flown in parade ranks even as the remainder of the Pride had born her casket to its resting place, blaming _outcasts, remnants, jumped-up raiders, the kind who would never have gotten their hands on this kind of ordinance before we_ _-_ A glance from Cross had silenced them, but the murmurs still sounded in her ears. _Too like her father. Ready to throw our lives away with hers for those we ought to be saving from themselves._ Cross had blinked, remembering the soldier who had put herself on the line for their collective dream since she could successfully wield a gun, and repressed a sigh.

The perfect knight, to stand astride a hill with a standard like her golden hair blowing in the wind over a land tamed and scoured of its bounty of tech. It had not been that way, of course. Cross thought of Lyons standing over a river, a treasure hoard of water free for all the people of the blossoming Capitol Waste, and bent to touch the freshly disturbed earth. She thought of the wide-eyed toddler, sometimes stumbling along beside her through what was once the Great Plains, sometimes perched in the back of the convoy’s brahmin-drawn cart and staring at the blasted landscape overgrown with mutfruit and corn that was more fibrous wood than germ. Of the set-jawed squire, lubricating hydraulic armor joints and sparring in the outer courtyard with a hero’s determination. Of the paladin, gazing over the walls through a rifle scope, staring down insubordinators, arguing with the other girl-child Cross had once journeyed with.

She had only seen Catherine once since her departure, striding along the opposite riverbank in the direction of Rivet City. It had been three days before Sarah's death, and though Cross had thought of calling out, she had not. If Catherine thought that her role in the East Coast Brotherhood's tale had ended, then that was how it must be. They had fought side-by-side for a time, for the Wastes and for James who had done so much for the wastes, but in the end, Catherine had released Cross from her service and Cross had understood. She could not protect Catherine from the world any more than she could have protected the headstrong, determined Brotherhood Elder who now lay dead at her feet.

 _A very, perfect, gentle knight._ Catherine, with her Vault education, had quoted that once, and though it was in reference to Cross herself, Cross had thought that within Lyon’s Pride there was room for at least one other such knight. And now that knight was gone, no golden-haired child to succeed her, no promising protégé or strong right arm, only an old soldier cobbled together from spare parts and standing alone on twin faults of Brotherhood tenets and loyalty to the Wastelanders they had come to serve, protect, and love. Those outside the antique walls that enclosed a miser's hoard of marvels and lifesaving devices, things those outside would once never have benefited from and now, most likely, never would: given the Waters of Life but deprived of the means of prolonging life, defending life, by the chosen few. Owen had rejected such thoughts, reaching out to those around them through patrols and broadcasts and alliances. Sarah had rejected them in turn, putting herself on the line for those who would work with them in symbiosis. It now, it seemed, fell to her and perhaps some few others—a new wave of outcasts, self-exiled for new beliefs, not for adherence to old—to carry their vision on. Some of the Pride remained—Kodiak, Dusk, Gallows, perhaps even Pek, all devoted to their fallen leader, all willing to rally behind the banner and golden hair against the tyranny that had formed them, that they now stood against.

She had always drawn those around her to her.

Body old, slow, and faulty, cybernetic and organic mechanisms alike creaking and protesting, Cross rose to her feet. Somehow, she would rally the banner again. Somehow.


	3. 2277, 2254, 2287

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Here when I say "I never want to be without you,"  
> somewhere else I am saying  
> "I never want to be without you again." And when I touch you  
> in each of the places we meet
> 
> in all of the lives we are, it's with hands that are dying  
> and resurrected. 
> 
> \- Bob Hickock, "Other Lives and Dimensions and Finally a Love Poem"

Cross stood, mute, in the shadow of the rotunda as a roughly woman-sized bag was hauled from the basement of their life's work. The purifier had been roused to life, then pulled back from death by fingers now singed to brittle charcoal. Its steady working thrummed in her ears, in the ears of all those regrouping, debriefing, continuing. Strange, now, to think that the same power that had burned through power armor, through the infinitely finer living membranes and tissue of life, now quiescently stripped its own impurity from the waters rushing around them. The power that had claimed the older, brittler husk inside the second bag, the one that Catherine, sobbing on her shoulder, could not bear to look at either.

"She didn't want to go in there." Catherine's voice was reedy and choked, like a badly-played instrument. "She didn't think it was her duty, or destiny, or anything. But she still did it. I already let my father die, it should have—"

Cross held up a hand. "I have never known a Lyons to make a rash decision. Whatever conclusion the two of you came to, I trust that you made one that, in the end, will further the good of this land."

Tangled in each other, together they wept for joy and despair.

***

"...straight through the jointing and into the femoral artery. She took them with her even as she was bleeding out, for what it's worth." Gunny sounded calmer than Sarah had ever heard. From her vantage point at the door, she stepped into a patch of dusty sunlight ahead of her fellow squires still being hurried around by those assigned to protect them through the purging of their new home.

"Not a second's hesitation." Her father's voice was dull as he knelt beside the fallen black mountain of Cross's armor. "I shouldn't be surprised. Ultimately I suppose I'm not."

"Papa?" In the huge building's silence, Sarah's voice sounded small in her own ears. She briefly imagined the blast, the dying howls of the Super Mutants who still lay in bloody heaps to one side, and shivered. "Is it Cross?"

"Yes, darling." Her father's hand was heavy on her back. "Remember this moment. She gave her life for mine, as she was sworn to, and none of us will ever forget."

"Wait till I'm big," Sarah replied, unsure until much later why her father had, finally, sobbed at the words. "I bodyguard you then."

***

"To treat the people of this land as collateral damage - _that_ is unacceptable. No matter how much lip service you have paid to the memory of Owen Lyons."

Across the Prydwyn's flame-haloed bridge, Maxson's eyes shone with no less fervor than Cross saw in the eyes of the woman at her side, than she had seen countless times in her own. "It was the way forward, Cross. The only way. The hostilities from those we have used Owen's legacy to save, from themselves and from the animals of the Institute—"

"They were yours to help. Not to save." What might once have been a shout of defiance from Sarah was now an even-handed statement, too level to be anything but true. "It's over, Maxson. This testament to the strong-arming excess we left behind in NCR will be destroyed, and so will the ones who stood behind it."

Across the bridge, the two struck, as one, at the one.

***

They looked like Brotherhood, but not the Brotherhood Nora knew—their power armor scuffed and dented, weapons cobbled together out of piping and miscellaneous lengths of wood and metal.The fire that Shaun had helped them build, that he now stood beside inspecting the pot of smoky-smelling tato stew, lit their faces as terse, military-sounding exchanges smoothed into a relaxed camaraderie. “We’re more of an auxiliary,” the oldest was saying, a man the others referred to as Kodiak and whose broad shoulders and gentle face reminded her of Nate. “Maxson has a few designated groups to lead the ground-level relief efforts—everything the first wave of the East Coast Brotherhood wanted. We’re all that’s left of them, at least north of the Capitol, but we’re still going strong.”

“So they collect the tech and then you redistribute it?” Nora replied. Shaun pulled next to her and she snuggled him against her side, his slow, quiet breathing and warmth a grounding element in the chilly night air.

“It is, to an extent.” Kodiak proffered a container of some kind of dry, hard-looking biscuits the others had begun dunking into their stew. Nora took one and followed suit. “We do our best not to hoard tech away where it can’t help anyone, either. That was our Elders’ dream when they came here from NCR, and it’s what we still do as the Lyon’s Pride.”

“You act like it was all Maxson’s idea to keep a civilian liaison in the first place,” argued the skinny, earnest man who had called himself Corporal Pek. “If it hadn’t been for Cross pushing it in the years after Elder Lyons Junior died we’d be up there on the Prydwyn with everyone else.”

“How can you be a junior elder?” Shaun piped up.

The Lyon’s Pride exchanged glances. In her best friendly cross-examiner voice, Nora spoke: “Unless you need to be anywhere soon we’d be glad to swap stories. You caught us on the way to Beacon Hills, but our friends there aren’t expecting us there for a week at the outside.”

“What do you think, Kodiak?” The question came from a short young woman named Paladin Kali, a small smile playing on her lips. “Can these outsiders be trusted with the tale of our sordid past?”

“Considering they’re practically Brotherhood as it is,” Kodiak replied, face full of warmth and sadness in the wavering firelight, “I suppose they deserve to hear the story of the women who put us here today.”

Eyes shining like her son’s. Nora leaned in to listen.

**Author's Note:**

> Happy Yuletide, Furiosity, and thank you for the opportunity to write about these two. A little self-indulgent poetry, a little timeline fudging (the wiki doesn't give a specific date for Sarah's death, just that it wasn't long after Owen's) and I came up with this. Hope you like it, and happy holidays.


End file.
